One of the most critical problems in the use of radioactive materials, whether used commercially or in research, has been to find methods for safely disposing of the waste materials. In earlier times it was thought that underground burial or deep sea burial would be satisfactory because of the shielding value of many feet of earth or sea water. These methods proved to be unsatisfactory because underground water and deep sea currents transferred the radioactive materials away from the burial site; and the half-lives of the radioactive materials were so large that the radiation from each material would last for long periods of time. These two factors have made burial techniques societally unacceptable. Treatment processes were employed to concentrate the radioactive materials in a more chemically stable form. Such processes were very expensive, very time-consuming, or otherwise unsuccessful. There has been great need to find a satisfactory method for making such radioactive materials safely disposable.
It is an object of this invention to provide a satisfactory process for treating radioactive materials to make them disposable in an accepted ecological manner. It is another object of this invention to provide an electrolysis process for treating aqueous media containing radioactive materials to make them into a mass from which the radioactive materials are nonleachable. Still other objects will become apparent from the more detailed description which follows.